What is deep learning?
Getting computers to learn, reason, and think (make decisions) is a science that is commonly called cognitive computing, of which machine learning and deep learning are a big part. The following Venn diagram shows how these fields are related to the overarching field of AI:
As the diagram suggests, deep learning is one type of machine learning algorithm. What is perhaps not widely known is that the field of deep learning has existed for quite some time, but hasn't really been widely used until very recently. The rekindling in interest is due to the extraordinary advances in computer, cloud, and storage technologies observed in the last few years that have fuelled exponential growth in AI with the development of many new deep learning algorithms, each best suited to solve a particular problem.
As we'll discuss later in this chapter, deep learning algorithms are especially good at learning complex non-linear hypotheses. Their...